Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  “The mechanism’s doing just fine,” Ingersol assured him. “A couple of fluctuations in power levels, but there’s a three-minute buffer, which should be enough to retrieve the occupant even if the tank crashed halfway through.”

  “Any chance of it crashing?” Grant asked sharply.

  “There’s always a chance,” Ingersol told him, “but right now it’s operating well. I mean, it’s as old as God, but it’s doing its thing. Just let it be, Billy, and it’ll get her there.”

  “Then we’ll donate it to a bloody museum,” Grant muttered. “BP is coming up to low-normal levels … respiration is eight. Good brain activity. Pulse is 22, still in bradycardia. I pulled her records. Normal resting rate for Queneau is about 38. Body temperature is 30 … hypothermic. Standby meddrones. She could go into seizure if the machine doesn’t bring her up fast.”

  The drones moved in quickly. Preloaded hypoguns hovered a hand’s span from Queneau’s neck and shoulders. Vaurien swore quietly, a soft French oath, and Shapiro was anxious enough for his hands to be clenched into white-knuckled fists.

  “Hold off on the drones, Bill,” Ingersol cautioned. “The retrieval systems are on automatics … the pad under her is at 40 degrees, and she’s about to get drugs. The injectors are right under her shoulder blades and pelvis, and they’re priming themselves. Damn, these old tanks are weird.”

  “But they worked,” Mark added wryly, “and it appears they still do.”

  Grant gave a rueful grunt and played the handy over Queneau’s torso. “Body temp is 34, respiration is 10, pulse is 33. Injectors are online … she’s getting muscle relaxants and stimulants, and I do not like these drugs, or the dosages. Too crude and way too high.”

  “State of the art,” Jazinsky told him, “two centuries ago.”

  “Whatever … she’s going to wake very soon. Etienne, drop the light levels.” Grant came closer, moving into a position where Queneau would see his face the moment she opened her eyes. “Temp is 36 … good enough,” Grant crooned. “Pulse is 34. It’ll do. Alpha waves are breaking up. Come on, girl. Come on, Queneau. Any time.” He leaned closer and raised his voice. “Jo. Big Jo. Time to wake up. Jo!”

  Her head moved on the foam pad, her face clenched, she took a deep breath, coughed in a great spasm, and her eyelids opened. Her voice was husky, low, and Marin strained to hear it.

  “Mick? Where’s Mick? Vidal?”

  “He’s all right,” Grant said levelly. “He’s in decontamination. He’ll be fine. Take it slowly, Jo. Another breath, deep and even. How are your eyes?” He was holding a hand up before her face.

  “Where?” she rasped.

  “The Wastrel,” Grant told her. “You’re back home. Can you see my hand? How many fingers?”

  She seemed to struggle to focus, blinking repeatedly. “Three. I’m cold. I have a freakin’ great headache, and … I think I’m going to heave.”

  He moved fast, lending his hands. “Sit up, roll over the side. Heave if you want to. Nausea is perfectly normal in retrieval shock.”

  “Retrieval shock?” Travers echoed. “I never heard of it.”

  “You wouldn’t have.” Mark drew back from the tank and joined them at the flatscreen. “It was common in the early days of colonization, when cryosleep periods were months long because ships were so slow, and the tanks themselves were far from anything we’d trust our lives to today. The drugs are also crude, as Bill observed, and the dosages are very high. Nausea is quite normal, along with blurred vision, disorientation, dizziness, muscle tremor, impaired hearing, sore throat, edema and hypothermia in the extremities, persistent bradycardia and low blood pressure.” He looked from Shapiro to Travers and Marin. “I did a little research into these rudimentary mechanisms. They did the job, and the occupant usually recovers in six or ten hours.”

  “That long?” Shapiro’s brows rose.

  “That long,” Grant said grimly as Queneau’s hands clenched weakly on the padded sides of the tank and her insides spasmed in dry heaves. The handy was still playing over her, and he looked far from pleased. “She’s also dehydrated and malnourished, same as Vidal. Look, the whole lot of you, just bugger off and let me work. Give her a chance to know what ship she’s on before you start looking at her for answers! I doubt she could string two coherent sentences together just now.”

  He was right, and Shapiro turned his back on the screen with a sigh. “She’s alive,” he said to no one in particular, “which is a miracle in itself. When we lost the Orpheus, I never expected to see either of them again. We knew they were in the Drift somewhere, somewhen, but …” He shook his head slowly. “Grant’s right. We need information.”

  “But you’re not going to get it from Jo Queneau or Mick Vidal,” Vaurien reasoned, “not for a while. Mark, you downloaded a great deal of data from Lai’a.”

  “And took the short version via verbal report,” Mark affirmed. “It knows a lot about transspace, but very little about the ship it salvaged.”

  Vaurien was moving. “Breakfast? And you can regale us. Barb, are you coming?”

  “Yes.” She folded down the handy and left the tank to Grant, his two human assistants and the swarm of drones. “She looks stable enough.”

  “She is.” Mark looked back into the screen. “She’s just sick, and apparently most people were, when they were retrieved from this generation of machinery. The body must recover in its own time, there’s only so much we can do with drugs.”

  “Then we’re waiting for her, and for Michael,” Shapiro decided. “Doctor Grant, I’ll ask you to call us, when either she or Vidal, and preferably both, are ready to talk.”

  His expression was taut with anger. “When they’re up for it, I’ll give you fifteen minutes, max,” he warned. “The second either of them starts to stress, you’ll get tossed through that door and told not to come back for two hours.”

  Shapiro actually chuckled. “Fair enough. You said something about breakfast, Richard –?”

  The ’chefs in the mess had been set up an hour before. Midani Kulich was sitting with Dario and Leon while Tor Sereccio and Roy Arlott argued over the combination of scrambled eggs and grapefruit marmalade. Tor had piled them onto slices of meatloaf and was spooning mint jelly and horseradish over the top while Roy made disgusted faces. Vaurien looked once into the Resalq’s plate, rolled his eyes, and grabbed an oversized coffee mug.

  Already done eating, Dario pushed his plate away as he watched Mark pull up a chair. “We were listening to the loop. Pilot Queneau is going to survive, but Bill says she’s dangerously underweight.”

  “He’s right,” Jazinsky said tersely, still at the ’chef. “If she comes down with any one of a dozen high-power viruses that are common in the Deep Sky right now, she’ll check out. So will Vidal, for that matter. He’s in a bad way, and damn’ lucky to be alive at all, by the looks of him.”

  “Both he and Lai’a were seriously contaminated,” Vaurien added. “The tanks saved the other two, but Vidal came through the jaws of the exit event ‘naked.’ He was in the Orpheus cockpit, Tully?”

  And Ingersol nodded grimly. “I sent a drone in there. The flight systems were still alive when they got him into a tank. Oh, he was flying that weird-ass mongrel of a ship until Lai’a grabbed it in tractors … and there was no way the hull armor was going to give him much protection.”

  “Damn,” Travers said softly to Marin, “that took guts. I’m guessing he got the other two into the tanks to protect them.”

  “Or to spin out what life support they had left,” Ingersol hazarded, “and it wasn’t much. I had my drones take a look at all systems they could get access to, and the Orpheus-Odyssey hybrid had maybe two, three hours of heat and gas mix left. They cut it fine … wherever they came from.” He reached for the sugar and looked down the table at Mark. “Do we have any idea where they came from? Or how long they’d been there? All I know is, the chronos were way off, like they’d been stopped and restarted on arbitrary numbers … and going by t
he physical condition of Vidal and Queneau, they were in there a long time.”

  Mark’s expression was darkly thoughtful as he stirred grapefruit juice into black coffee and salted it. “Several things, we know for sure. From Michael’s perspective, months have passed since the launch of the Orpheus. Did your drones get a look at the chronometer, Tully?”

  “Yeah, but it does us no good.” Ingersol made a broad gesture with his mug. “It froze five hours after the Orpheus launched.”

  “It didn’t run properly, in transspace?” Dario asked shrewdly.

  “It did, for five hours,” Ingersol mused, “and the next thing you’re going to ask is –”

  “What would cause it to freeze?” Jazinsky’s voice was taut.

  “Right.” Ingersol sat back, massaging both eyeballs with both thumbs. He was starting to wind down. Soon, he would need either ten hours of sleep or more peps. “Not a mechie. The drone said the mechanism is fine. It just … stopped.”

  “I’m going to say it passed into or through a temporal field,” Mark said quietly. “I’ve observed the phenomenon, Tully. So we can speculate with a degree of certainly that they passed through such a field, and on the far side of it … well, they could have been in a different timestream for a long, long time. But we know for certain, it was a stable environment – something like a tidepool, like Alshie’nya. Quite workable enough for them to take four ships and use them to create a fifth, in order to get back out of there.”

  “Damn,” Vaurien breathed, “that’s heavy industry. Drones?”

  “Had to be.” Jazinsky sat back, breathing coffee vapors, eyes half closed. “Now, the Orpheus had one small handling drone. According to its specs at launch, the Odyssey had three servitors designed for manipulating the fueling system, power couplers, servicing the reactors. The two ships had nothing between them that could have cut up two Resalq hulls and moved them into place for Arago tethering.”

  “So,” Vaurien went on, “it’s a safe guess our people stumbled into a region where there were at least two ships, more or less wrecked. If they hadn’t been wrecked, why not just boot them right back up and fly them out of there? Why bother to torch them apart and reassemble them into the hybrid?”

  “The two wrecks were Resalq ships,” Tor said pointedly, “and you have no idea how old they are. Mark told me, they were old when he was young!”

  “‘Old’ doesn’t necessarily mean trash,” Mark said ruefully. “From what I can tell, the engine deck was salvaged from a heavy freighter of about the same vintage as the Freyana. The machinery is still completely functional. As soon as it, and Lai’a, are fully decontaminated, you could fire up the Orpheus-Odyssey hybrid and fly it without a qualm. The work was excellently done, and I can only assume the industrial drones that performed it were sourced from one or both of the Resalq wrecks.”

  Jazinsky’s voice was almost singsong. “Two wrecks, both in the same place, both accessible … then the Orpheus happens along, and the Odyssey is also there, badly damaged. You know what it sounds like?”

  Dario sat forward, elbows on the table. “A starship graveyard. A place where something like the Odyssey Tide washes up, and in the eddies and shoals there, anything that gets caught in the Tide – as Mick and Queneau did, we saw it happen! – eventually fetches up in the same place.”

  “Shit,” Roy whispered, “there could be a hundred ships there, all busted up, mangled by the Drift, and dumped on the rocks.”

  The image was haunting, and Marin whistled. “Mark, did you get anything from Lai’a to corroborate all this?”

  But Mark made negative noises. “It followed a distress beacon, and we’ve all heard the beacon before. We picked it up clearly when the Orpheus launched.”

  “Damn,” Jazinsky breathed. “I knew that signal was two hours old, max, and I knew it was broadcast by the Odyssey. I just hunted everywhere for any other rational explanation, like phantom echoes. Hellgate ghosts.”

  “And in the end, you come to realize your intuition was correct.” Mark set down his mug and steepled his fingers on the table before him. “However, Lai’a did not pass through the temporal field. It was not compelled to because, unlike the Orpheus, it could navigate inside transspace rather than surfing, or tacking, on Arago fields. It certainly detected the temporal field, but couldn’t get readings out of it. Instead, it says it followed the distress beacon into a region of intense radiation flux, and reeled in the Orpheus-Odyssey hybrid, like a fish on a line, in the process getting itself thoroughly contaminated.

  “The hybrid apparently came directly through the radiation flux which, I imagine, was the way out of the safe, stable tidepool we’ve been speculating about. It’s probably a region of freefall, balanced perfectly between temporo-gravitic zones. Easy to get sucked into, almost impossible to climb back out of, with time streaming at different rates in different directions, influenced by massive gravity fields and currents of unspeakable energy arcing from one gravity well to the next.” His voice tapered into silence. “The gravity express. Transspace. I think,” he said softly, “we have glimpsed with our own eyes what the Zunshu have always known.”

  The concepts strained Marin’s imagination to the limits. His grasp of theoretical physics was far too rudimentary for him to even begin to know what was actually possible, what was probable, what was wild conjecture. He placed his trust in Mark’s knowledge of the ancestral Resalq science, and what they knew the Zunshu could do.

  “How long,” Vaurien was asking, “before Lai’a will be cleaned up enough for us to get close to it?”

  “A couple of days,” Ingersol told him. “At the moment we’re frying drones faster than we can break them out of storage.” He yawned deeply. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to go put my head down. Bill wants me and my crew back in the Infirmary in a few hours. We’re going to extract Rabelais. Damn! That sounds so weird.”

  “So wonderful,” Jazinsky added. She dropped a hand on Vaurien’s, on the table. “I need some sleep, Richard.”

  “You’re not the only one, kiddo.” Vaurien shoved back his chair and stood, one arm around her shoulders. He touched the bug in his right ear. “Bill, you still there?”

  The loop was a muted purr in the background of Marin’s hearing, ignored until he chose to listen to it. He heard Grant now, from the Infirmary: “Right here, boss – for about the next ten seconds, then I’m going to hand over to the drones. I gotta go crash.”

  “When are you purging the second tank?” Vaurien asked tiredly.

  “Noon, or later,” Grant told him. “You want sooner?”

  “Later,” Vaurien corrected. “This whole crew is going to jump its tracks if it doesn’t get some downtime. If the tank is stable, leave it to AI monitoring and give us six hours.”

  “Six hours,” Grant breathed, “is fine by me.”

  Jazinsky stood, leaning heavily on Vaurien’s side. “Wake me,” she said tersely to Grant.

  “Us,” Vaurien corrected. “Later, people.”

  Marin watched the gathering break up, and when Travers offered more coffee, he nodded, though he spoke to Mark. “You’re going with Lai’a.” Not a question.

  And Mark’s face warmed with a familiar, crooked smile. “There’s every reason to go, Curtis.” He reached across the table, took Marin’s right hand in both of his own. “You haven’t seen the data Lai’a retrieved from Elarne. It reached as far into transspace as its sensors could probe, found the fixed points that can be mapped, and nailed them down.” His voice caught. “But there’s more, and I’m only beginning to understand it.” He looked up as Travers returned with the coffee, and sat. “Lai’a has a lot of power to pump into its sensor probes, but even so, to glimpse as far as Orion 359 is beyond anything I imagined.”

  For a moment Marin grappled with the remark, and wished he knew more about the physics which were the language used, properly, to describe such phenomena. “Orion 359 is another black hole system, a lot like Naiobe. Your ships traveled for years at high
speeds to reach it, didn’t they? And it was the first, the only place they discovered traces of Zunshu activity, away from Hellgate itself.”

  “Quite correct.” Mark’s tonguetip moistened his lips. “Orion 359 is another station on the gravity express … it’s years away, by Weimann drive, through normal any e-space transit. But in transspace, Lai’a could see it, like looking up the rail line and seeing the next station.”

  “Christ,” Travers whispered.

  “Exactly.” Mark gave Marin’s hand a squeeze and let it go. “Lai’a is so eager to return to transspace, I can scarcely keep it here. It stays because it knows its purpose – to work with us, find and neutralize the Zunshu threat. But since it returned with the Orpheus-Odyssey hybrid, it’s given me three good reasons for cutting it loose, letting it explore and chart transspace at least between here and Orion 359, while we literally muddle around with the pitiful human business of the Colonial Wars.” The gold eyes were wide as he looked from Marin to Travers and back. “Lai’a was bred and born for transspace. It doesn’t belong here, and now it’s tasted its own home waters, it’s impatient to return.”

  Marin whistled softly. “Can you keep it here long enough for us to get the habitation module finished?”

  “Yes,” Mark said thoughtfully, “but I take nothing for granted. It’s doing as it’s asked, Curtis, not as it’s told. There’s a difference.”

  Because Lai’a was the most powerful single body ever to be constructed, with the most powerful AI, and if it chose to follow its own path, Marin thought, it would be unstoppable. He gave Neil a sidelong frown. “You can control Lai’a, Mark, can’t you?”

  “Control it?” Mark sat back. “If you mean, can I make it dance to a tune, the way drones and office AIs like Joss and Etienne do, then no. But to all practical purposes I’m its father, and it respects me. I can no more control it than I could control the two of you – but you value my judgment, you ask for my advice, and when I tell you something is critically important, you know I’m not deceiving you. At the end of the day we reach consensus, we go forward with a plan that benefits all.” He’s brows rose, creasing his forehead. “The same is true of Lai’a.”